Mamdani To Launch City-Backed Insurance Program For Affordable Housing

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is set to unveil a plan Thursday to provide relief from soaring insurance costs for owners of rent-stabilized and affordable housing.

The Mamdani administration plans to create a first-of-its-kind city-backed property and liability insurance program targeting small rent-stabilized and affordable housing landlords after the rate of insurance for those groups tripled in the past decade.

“We’re not trying to replace the entire insurance market,” NYC Deputy Mayor for Housing Leila Bozorg said during a Wednesday afternoon press briefing. “We want to create a program that can compete in it by operating much more efficiently.”

The NYC Economic Development Corp., Housing Development Corp. and Department of Housing Preservation and Development are leading the initiative and expect to start seeking out partners for the program’s first stages next month.

The city plans to first conduct a risk analysis and identify criteria for landlords seeking out coverage, using that information to design the program and define eligibility criteria for affordable and rent-stabilized owners.

The interagency group will later seek out insurance captives and brokers to become providers that ultimately run the program, aiming to insure 20,000 homes by 2027 and 100,000 homes by 2030.  

The administration would back the program through the city’s own expense budget, which covers short-term expenses like personnel costs. The plan must be approved by the city council. 

Bozorg said the initiative will bring insurance costs down by between 20% and 30% for participating landlords, freeing up cash to invest in repairs and maintenance.

Lowering insurance costs would also lower the cost of underwriting affordable housing development for the city, allowing for more capital to go toward new housing creation rather than to insurance carriers, Bozorg said.

At present, every $100 premium increase requires more than $1,200 in city capital in new transactions, according to city estimates. 

Insurance has become the largest driver of operating cost increases for housing providers in New York, according to an Enterprise Community Partners study. The city’s initiative is a reaction to insurance costs that have risen disproportionately over the last decade to become one of landlords’ costliest line items, Bozorg said.

“Insurance costs have gone up threefold for the affordable housing industry since 2018, and that doesn’t mean the risk profile has gone up threefold,” Bozorg said. “That is not a market that is working well. That’s a market that is failing a critical public asset class.”

Tackling costs has been a tenet of the Mamdani administration's plan to address housing affordability, especially crucial as his promise to freeze rents in the city's 1 million rent-stabilized units has been bashed by the industry because landlords' costs have soared.